Early in November, a year ago, I first met the owner of the newly discovered
drawing profile portrait of a Milanese lady. It appeared in The Times
yesterday as an exciting “find” of a previously unknown work by Leonardo da
Vinci.
The owner, Peter Silverman, already had something of a reputation for
discovering masterpieces, and I was interested to see a photograph he had
with him. He invited me to Paris to see the technological evidence which he
was putting together to “prove” the attribution. I have always been
sceptical about new technologies and wanted to use my own eyes to make the
judgment.
It is on a large sheet of vellum, 33 by 24cm, stuck down to an old oak board.
The drawing is made in black chalk, reed pen and brown ink. The skin is then
most delicately modelled in white with a red chalk blush to the cheeks and
lips. Her hair and costume are in contrasting shades of brown, grey and
ochre.
A few years ago I was lucky enough to discover a major drawing by Michelangelo
in the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York. I was then asked by the press how I
had identified it and — perhaps outrageously — I said “cannot I recognise my
own wife over the breakfast table?” For connoisseurship to a large extent
really does depend on almost knee-jerk recognition, and as soon as I saw
this portrait image, I was well on the way to being persuaded that here was
not just a Leonardo drawing, but a masterpiece.
This comes from familiarity with a large number of autograph drawings by
Leonardo and an understanding of his capabilities as a painter. I also think
it comes from being aware of the rather different abilities of his closest
followers and imitators.
When I was in Paris in November last year I visited the Mantegna exhibition at
the Louvre. There on display was the superb marble bust by Gian Cristoforo
Romano of Beatrice D’Este, the little princess from Modena, which belongs to
the Louvre. She wears her hair tressed in precisely the same manner as in
the Silverman drawing. That marble is dated 1490-91, clearly the same
fashion as the drawing, so it must be of almost exactly the same date.
With Peter Silverman, I visited Pascal Cotte at Lumiere Technology who is
doing pioneering work using his unique multispectral scanner. He has
discovered that the tightly spaced follicles of the parchment would suggest
it is made from the skin of a lamb and that the drawn surface has undergone
a certain amount of abrasion and restoration that one would expect from a
drawing of a considerable age. Using the scanner one could see more clearly
than with the naked eye that the shading passed from the upper left to the
lower right in Leonardo’s usual distinctive manner. A sliver of the
parchment had been subjected to tests by the Institute of Particle Physics
in Zurich, which dated it to the range 1440-1650.
After my visit, a fingerprint was found in the chalk that corresponds with
that appearing in a Leonardo painting of St Jerome. So, as far as technology
is concerned, the drawing seems to have a remarkably clean bill of health.
What is so exciting is that no drawings by Leonardo on parchment are known,
although we do know from the Codex Atlanticus that Leonardo was
interested in the technology of drawing, in colour, on vellum.
Unfortunately, little is recorded of the provenance of the new “find”. It was
simply catalogued as German, early 19th century, by Christie’s, which sold
it in 1998 for $19,000.
By the time I visited Paris with Silverman, it had been seen by Martin Kemp.
As Emeritus Professor of History of Art at Oxford, he is widely regarded as
our foremost Leonardo scholar. At about the same time as I was introduced to
the secret, Nicholas Turner, another distinguished connoisseur of Italian
drawings, had also seen the drawing and was very favourably impressed. Both
Kemp and Turner are shortly to publish this astonishing discovery.
To my mind, the masterly appearance of this drawing not only proves that
Leonardo did work on parchment but it is the finest sheet discovered for
very many years by this remarkable genius of the Renaissance. It is an
iconic image of haunting beauty.
Sir Timothy Clifford was director-general of the National Galleries of
Scotland from 1984 to 2006
